EDMUND BURKE, POPULIST CONSERVATISM’S UNRECOGNIZED HERALD? Now available is Georgetown University Professor of Political Theory Joshua Mitchell’s updated edition of his “American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.”

Awakening was first issued in 2020 and is now updated to reflect events subsequent to its original publication, including the George Floyd crisis, the ensuring riots, the Biden election and the Biden rollback of Trump’s tenure.

In his review of the updated edition of the Mitchell work, American Conservative’s Colin Dueck, in addition to superbly explicating the book, points to an aspect of Edmund Burke’s writing that deserves much wider consideration. Dueck pulls all of it together in his three concluding graphs:

“For any conservatives who still feel the need to defer to today’s politically correct revolution, I urge them to reread Burke’s Reflections along with his 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace. Burke is angry, and justifiably so. He is angry at the sheer fanaticism, intolerance, and destruction wreaked by contemporary revolutionaries. He is angry at ‘men of letters,’ who provide excuses for it. He is angry at so-called political ‘moderates’—his own words—who weakly accommodate this destruction and allow it to continue. He correctly identifies French Jacobin militants as that country’s newfangled elite. As he puts it in the Letters:

‘When private men form themselves into associations for the purpose of destroying the preexisting laws and institutions of their country…massacring by judgments, or otherwise, those who make any struggle for their old legal government, and their legal, hereditary, or acquired possessions – I call this Jacobinism by establishment.’

“To be sure, Burke offers thoughtful, prudent warnings against radical social or political displacement. That is exactly why he refuses to take the revolutionaries’ continued success as a given. He understands that either the revolution will fail, or traditional Western liberties will falter. And he will do everything he can, big or small, to prevent the latter. Reconsider him first-hand. Ask yourself how he would tackle today’s woke fanatics. His recommended strategy is rollback, not appeasement. In short, Burke is a counterrevolutionary of an unusually fearless kind.”

The question Dueck does not address, but which cannot be avoided, is this: Is rollback still possible in the America of 2023?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The answer to that question is “yes.”